Update on august 30: I found in the Internet the map of cities that have been/are being invaded…

… or mailboxes in Bangalore…

As widespread as it is the use of color coding, it remains quite a local thing in many occasions. The meaning and associations attributed to different colors varies a lot in different cultures and societies, so color codes are constantly being invented to be used in specific situations and locations. Some of them may evolve to be fully global, maybe trough a formal standardization process, but in lot of cases they remain local, or are reinterpreted (translated) when moved to different situations and cultural environments….

A small test: what different type of garbage do you think you should throw in each container?, what type of letters would you put in each mailbox? (try to answer the question without reading the small print in the photographs…)

How many times have you heard or read that sentence?. I’ve googled it, and there are more than 7000 references, counting both globalized and globalised spelling (by the way, which is the correct way of writing it?).

Usually, it acts as a starting point to two different types of arguments. On one side, the catastrophic view: due to globalization cultures and traditions will be lost, the natural environment will be destroyed and we will end up in a uniform, oppressive, orwellian world where difference will not even be remembered. On the other side globalization, serves as a excuse to push unpopular decisions (usually political or economical), like ‘because we live in a globalized world, we need to dismantle the welfare state…’.

These two arguments are based on a typical deterministic view of technology. It is obvious that what we call globalization has been speed up by the advent of new communication and information technologies, and, from a deterministic perspective, those new technologies determine how society is going to evolve; there is no way out, society has to resign to its fate…

There are several pitfalls to these arguments. It is simply not true that globalization is a new thing, there have always been global relations between the different regions of the world. Cultures and societies are not closed entities that have grown up and evolved in total isolation (yes, there is, maybe, the exception of some communities in some out of the way areas, island in the middle of the Pacific, Hymalayan valleys,…, but even in that case those peoples had to come from somewhere…). The idea of an intrinsically pure culture of a community (country, region, people, race…) that can be polluted and must be protected from external influences, is just a myth fed by nationalistic interests.

And, although it is true that new ICTs expedite and facilitate communication, relation, and sharing between different parts of the world, that does not mean that this integration must evolve in the directions we usually (and wrobly?) associate today to the word globalization.

Faster and better communication technologies bring with them more interaction between people and cultures, but that does not necessarily imply reducing the cultural, social and economical diversity of the world, as most of the arguments that start with ‘We live in a globalized world…’ try to suggest.

And what about the photo?

I think this one illustrates cultural diversity in a global world at its best: a Brazilian barber shop in the Chinatown area of NYC, probably frequented by Hispanic customers that also live in that area…

The text literally says: For the exclusive use of the Fire Brigade.

In the urban landscape, as in technological innovation, there is a constant tension between the originally intended usage of artifacts and spaces, and the creative modes of use that grow out of the daily interaction with them.

There are two approaches to this tension: the coercive approach, designing in a way that prevents different usages (mis-usages?) and, when design by itself is not enough, adding norms and rules, and the extensive approach, enabling, by design, the capability to add new modes of use that can extend the original intent.

Both of them have advantages and drawbacks: it is very difficult to completely prevent different usage models unless you resort to a heavily normative (policed) system; the best technological example being the completely unsuccessful attempt to prevent the sharing of music and, in general, content on the internet. But it is also quite difficult to ensure that the proliferation of new modes of use does not have a negative impact on the capability to deliver the original intended functionality…

In this image (taken in the Brick Lane area of East London) different layers are visible: the elevated train bridge structure dates from the industrial revolution era, the street sign in English and Bengali denotes the immigration flux in the second half of the twentieth century, the one-way signal indicates the necessity of traffic regulation related to street congestion, and the graffiti and stencils the current process of trendification (the phase prior to gentrification?) of the area.

The chronological relation between these layers may not be as straightforward as in the case of geology or archeology, where, basically, deeper means older; but there are also time cues, such as the rust in the Bengali street sign that can be read to understand how the different layers relate and overlap in the historic evolution of the city.

We have an image of the UK as one of the societies with a high level of concern on the protection of privacy. It is one of the few countries in Europe where there are no identity cards of any form issued by the government, and when, once in a while, an identity card initiative is proposed, it faces so much opposition that it gets dropped by politicians. The proliferation signs warning of CCTVs in operation is, at least superficially, opposite to this image.

Maybe the perception of the abundance of CCTVs was caused by the legal requirement to warn citizens of their existence, making CCTV signs quite ubiquitous in the London city landscape, but it certainly produced some estrange situations, like this CCTV sign besides a big graffiti (or street art?). Usually, the painting of street art such as this is somewhere in the fringes of legality, so the image makes you wonder what was first: the CCTV or the graffiti, and how those symbols of different lifestyles and attitudes ended up side by side in the street.

Beyond the curious image there is a whole reflection on how surveillance technology can change our habits and attitudes about the public space. Up to which extent do you change your behaviour when you know that CCTV is operating in a certain public space?, is the proliferation of surveillance warning signs going to trivialize it or, on the contrary, is it going to act to create social reaction to the technology?. And, of course, what happens when there is the possibility that some kind of surveillance is being done without any information signs?…

Panopticon or 1984, the fact is that surveillance based distopias are, today, part of our collective imaginary, so this is going to be an area of friction between technology capabilities and social expectations and concerns…

Found by my 6 years old son in a pedestrian street in Covent Garden, London (and the day was my 42nd birthday, so maybe that’s why I was feeling old…)